Major congratulations to him! What an achievement!
I wonder though: in these situations if he were to refuse the acquisition would Apple just steal his idea (NOT implementation) and bake it into the iPhone regardless? I think Microsoft did something like this, no? Any thoughts?
The article states "I’m not naive enough to claim Apple actually took my idea." You apparently are, though.
> Apple rips off student's rejected iPhone app - iOS 5 lifts idea, name, even logo
C'mon. "Wi-Fi Sync" is hardly a surprising name for such a feature, and making its logo the bog-standard Wifi logo with a bog-standard Sync logo superimposed is hardly a surprising choice either. It was a long-expected and long-awaited feature.
> Konfabulator, Dashboard controversy flows out of WWDC
A controversy about the bog-standard term "widget".
> Apple stole Karelia Watson
Well, it made its own version and named it cheekily. This seems to be the one mostly valid case in your post.
It was a different time when the images/weather app was rejected by Apple. They were deliberately trying to prevent people creating thin wrappers around websites and calling it an app. And at the start it made a lot of sense.
Syncing over WiFi was a feature that users had demanded long before that app had been around and the name/logo are not distinctive. They are the most common sense choices you would use.
And widgets existed decades before Konfabulator thought to bring them to OSX. They were available as Desk Accessories in the previous versions of Mac OS as well as on Windows/Linux.
Also, re: the shock of someone lifting the icon of the wifi sync thing. If I am an Apple designer, the first idea for a wifi sync icon will be combining the wifi icon with the sync icon. The most obvious way to do that is to put the sync icon (two circular arrows) around the wifi icon.
It's pretty clear this was just two people coming up with the same logical icon concept simultaneously.
Instapaper was an idea, and Marco is pretty firmly in the camp that you can't steal "ideas" (Though, you can do feature-by-feature clones, which another of his competitors did in a really annoying fashion. )
Yes, and he has discussed his fear on the launch of Read it Later, but the non effect (it was it a slight bump?) on his sales. To me however, that is a courteous approach. Apple saw and copied with a better implementation that 3rd parties couldn't copy.
I don't think that this is something he would need to worry about. Implementing complex algorithms is extremely difficult, even if you have detailed instructions (eg. from a published paper). I've read his website before and if I remember, he only published high level details. To steal his ideas, you'd need to have a similar background, and you'd need to know just as much about compression etc. as he does. And even if you found someone with the right expertise, it would still take a very long time to "steal" an idea like this.
When you're coming up with a new idea, you often have to go down a bunch of dead-end alleys and you're not even sure if what you're attempting is possible. When you're reimplementing an existing product you know exactly the right avenue to go down, and you know for sure it's possible.
And Apple has over a hundred billion dollars in cash and eighty thousand employees. They could certainly clone this software if they wanted to.
The reason to acquire is to signal to other people that doing innovative things on apple platforms can make you a millionaire, instead of signalling the same thing is a sucker's game as apple will steal your ideas if they're any good.
"you often have to go down a bunch of dead-end alleys and you're not even sure if what you're attempting is possible."
This is my biggest worry with my product. I literally spent two years going down dead-end alleys to refine my Information Flow Control System because there was nobody that I could copy from. We often hear "Ideas are worthless. It's the execution that matters." which is true but knowing what does and doesn't work is as important in my opinion.
Apple now knows you can capture video very efficiently with JPEG. People now know, if you want to build a powerful social media product, you'll have to use real names and so forth.
I can't back this up with citations as I don't remember where I read this from, but it basically said innovators are usually not the ones that benefits from their innovations. It's usually those that tweaks the innovations that benefit the most.
I guess the message is, if you do have something innovative, you should probably patent it. You might not be able to protect yourself from larger companies, but you'll certainly improve your chances of being acquired.
You do realize the enormous technical accomplishment that Snappycam's reworking of the jpg algorithm, and it's implementation on the iPhone processor was, right?
To call it a "decent iPhone app" somewhat puts down the 12 or so months of hard core research and implementation that jpap put into it.
As far as I can tell, Apple's acquisitions are fairly standard build-vs-buy decisions. Lala had the infrastructure for what became iTunes Match and the price was right, so they bought them. Siri was a fairly complete piece of technology that solved some hard technical problems, so they bought them. Konfabulator was a technically trivial application that Apple wanted to rewrite in a totally different way, so they built Dashboard.
>>would Apple just steal his idea (NOT implementation)
I think the App was more about the implementation than the idea. He created extremely efficient implementation of jpeg compression with 50000 lines of C++ code as far as I remember from the dev's blog. So Apple is obviously more interested in the guy than anything else.
Yeah, but that's a slightly different scenario – they a lot of developers on staff already know how to implement private message functionality, and they have better expertise on staff than SnapChat do for the difficult part - getting the UX right.
Here, just one guy was doing this a very sophisticated thing that was clearly out of the reach of Apple's developers (SnappyCam came out long before iOS 7, but the new in-house iPhone burst functionality doesn't work half as well as SnappyCam's).
Apple has earlier ripped off the Swiss Railway watch face, and also pilfered the idea of using volume button as a shutter for the camera. They apologized for the watch face, IIRC.
I wonder though: in these situations if he were to refuse the acquisition would Apple just steal his idea (NOT implementation) and bake it into the iPhone regardless? I think Microsoft did something like this, no? Any thoughts?